In a variety of different fields, including businesses and residences, there is a great desire to encourage people to wash their hands more effectively and more frequently. The U.S. Center for Disease Control has stated that the most important thing people can do to keep from getting sick is to wash their hands. And yet, many people, through lack of knowledge, poor habits or simple negligence either do not wash their hands frequently enough or effectively enough.
An example of a specific need for assuring sanitized hands is the food services industry. It has been known for many decades that food preparers, servers and so forth should clean and sanitize their hands prior to handling food to be served. This need is self-evident when food service employees enter restrooms. Bacteria (such as E-coli, those found in fecal matter, uncooked foods, etc.) in restrooms are well known health hazards and without proper cleaning/sanitization of the hands of restaurant employees, can be transmitted to unknowing customers. These and other concerns also suggest a need for sanitizing hands in private residences, especially in homes with children.
Currently, parents as well as health industry participants are trying to address the problem of insufficient hand washing with rules and regulations concerning hand washing. For instance, in many food service establishments there are signs which state roughly “Employees must wash their hands before leaving.” Methods that require adherence to a rule or policy by human beings with little or no reinforcement or monitoring, however, are typically insufficient to maximize compliance. Importantly, such rules and regulations do little or nothing to assure that even if hand washing is done, it is done correctly (e.g., with enough cleaning composition, for a long enough period of time to kill the germs, or with sufficient scrubbing). Further, there are a number of different commercial style soap dispensers that have methods of trying to assure frequency of hand washing by things such as electronic counting, identification, monitoring and so forth. However, none of these technologies also attempt to assure efficacy of hand washing in addition to frequency of hand washing. This distinction is important because a person can wash their hands often enough but not well enough. In short, frequency alone is not sufficient to assure effective hand washing.
Presently there are several systems intended to address the problem of insufficient hand washing. These systems are typically very complex and, accordingly, prohibitively expensive. U.S. Pat. No. 5,670,945, for example, discloses a complex system that has a sanitizing basin with moisture proof switches inside the sanitizing basin and proximity detectors. A person must insert both hands simultaneously into the sanitizing basin in order to initiate the desired output signal. Additionally, U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,426,701; 5,945,910; 5,812,059; 5,202,666; 4,896,144; 3,967,478; 5,610,589; 4,688,585 and 5,199,188 and U.S. Patent Application Nos. 2003/0030562; 2003/0197122; 2003/0019536; and 2004/0001009 all involve relatively complex systems containing components such as complex electronics, location sensors, pumps and so forth (often mixed together in complex attempts to require hand washing). In summary, the presently available systems are typically expensive, complex to install, difficult to maintain and it can be difficult to train users in their operation.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,771,925 discloses a soap dispenser that has timing mechanism when the soap dispenser is utilized. The timing mechanism is included in the housing for the soap dispenser such that each time the soap dispenser is replaced, the timing mechanism must also be replaced. Additionally, the timing mechanism only provides an indication of a minimum amount of time that a user should wash his hands but does not provide any mechanism to ensure that the user does wash his hands for the minimum amount of time.